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Austan
Austan Austan is a nondescript world located in the Outer Rim, in the Arkanis Sector. It is located on the Najiba Loop, well off of any trade routes, and is often overlooked in favor of the more accessible Tatooine or more populous Arkanis. Austan sits at the threshold of Hutt and Imperial spheres of influence. It has been nominally settled for nearly a thousand years, originally by Alderaanian farmers and ranchers who managed to live without Hutt interest by remaining poor and uninteresting. This peaceful agrarian existence lasted for centuries until the mining boom. From 825 BBY to 478 BBY, Austan was heavily mined for Doonium. Large ravines were cut to extract the ore, which have turned into vast canyon networks in the intervening centuries. The planet has vast reserves of Doonium toward its core, but no mining efforts have been made in recent centuries due to the extraction expense. In the years after the mining effort, cities were established in the relative shelter of the canyons, and became centers of trade, though only a trickle of off-world commerce occurred. For several hundred years, Austan remained a relatively isolated world of quiet farmers, ranchers, and miners. Austan has a robust belt of asteroids that were mined during this period. Most of the ore was shipped off-world for processing, and Austan never developed more than a few small-scale smelting and manufacturing centers. In recent years, there have been a handful of resorts developed in the asteroid belt, but these are largely managed by offworld consortiums. In 52 BBY, Austan became the destination for a prisoner resettlement program begun during the last years of the Old Republic. Nonviolent criminals were settled there in lieu of harsher sentences in exchange for indentured agricultural labor contracts. At first, this was well-received by the native ranchers as they were happy to get cheap labor. Over the course of the intervening decades, though, the prisoners kept coming and the ones who served their time largely remained. As the population slowly grew, so did the economy, and this attracted the attention of the Hutts. Though Austan never developed a Hutt presence on the level of other regional centers like Tatooine, it hosted several Hutt-owned businesses and was visited occasionally by low-level members of the Gnuda Kajidic as part of perfunctory managerial junkets. Day-to-day operations were largely handled on a local level, and the bloated hand of the Hutts was loathsome but largely invisible. During the Clone Wars and early days of the Empire, the world had no official governmental presence, and the day-to-day execution of prisoner contracts was left to corporate executors. More often than not, this resulted in criminal activity and exploitation. Small-time Black Sun and Hutt operations sprang up to profit from this labor pool and Austan became known as an exporter of Bounty Hunters, Assassins, and Thugs. A colorful local gang culture emerged as a result, with numerous competing petty gangs forming fluid and ever-shifting alliances. In 5BBY, The 5th Fleet landed a prefabricated forward base near the city of Paldra, and a garrison has been stationed there ever since. Regular patrols, inspections, and interviews began shortly thereafter. A gang war soon followed, and the Hutts prevailed over Black Sun and the homegrown gangs. Subfactions still exist, but the Empire has used the vacuum as an excuse to crack down on the remainder.